Proteus ( Πρωτεύς, Prōteus), the satyr play which originally followed the first three plays of The Oresteia, is lost except for a two-line fragment preserved by Athenaeus. It is widely believed to have been based on the story told in Book IV of Homer's Odyssey, where Menelaus, Agamemnon's brother, tries to return home from Troy and finds himself on an island off Egypt, "whither he seems to have been carried by the storm described in Agam.674". [14] Beneath the war for justice, there’s another war going on throughout Oresteia: the gender conflict between males and females of power. Furies – also known as the Erinyes or "infernal goddesses", the Furies serve as Zeus' enforcers in Argos and punish those who swear false oaths. Ian has written numerous stage productions including OH WHAT A NIGHT!, Sl eeping Beauty The Musical and One Night at the V.E. Day Proms. The Furies accuse Orestes of the ultimate horror in shedding his mother’s blood; no matter his justification, they insist that he is polluted and cannot return to Argos or belong to any religious or family community. Apollo speaks in his defence, arguing that matricide does not count as the murder of a family member, because, according to one of several competing medical theories circulating in Aeschylus’ time, women’s bodies provide only a container for the embryo, which is formed solely of material from the father’s body. The jury is split, and Athena breaks the tie in favour of Orestes. Whatever may be true of human biology, she at least is entirely her father’s daughter, born from his head: ‘And so in every way I’m for the male.’ Clytemnestra was accused of having a heart like a man. Electra, in desperate grief, obsessed over her dead father and absent brother, and resented her mother. Athena takes the pattern of female male-sympathisers even further: she has the militaristic, dominant heart of her father Zeus, and insists that the sunlit, male-dominated world of politics will, from now on, prevail over the underground, ancestral blood-rights of the female Furies. The Furies are, understandably, furious. But Athena restrains their anger by promising them a permanent, if subordinate place in the ritual life of the city – something analogous to the political status that resident aliens (‘metics’) had in real-life Athens.

Oresteia by Aeschylus - Greek Mythology Oresteia by Aeschylus - Greek Mythology

Aeschylus (1975). The Oresteia. New York, New York: Penguin Group. pp. 103–172. ISBN 978-0-14-044333-2.

Footnotes

The play recounts the story of Orestes and his sister Electra in their quest to avenge the death of their father Agamemnon, king of Argos, by killing their mother Clytemnestra and her husband Aegisthus, who had deposed and killed him. But sounds of his death at their hands are heard from offstage, and the scene is set for the encounter between mother and son: Even though Oresteia is cosmic in scope and explores numerous topics, the two major themes of the trilogy – as suggested by Ian Christopher Storey and Arlene Allan – are the shifting notion of justice and the gender conflict. The Birth of a New Dike (Justice) Alan Sommerstein, Aeschylus, Loeb Classical Library, 3 vols. Greek text with facing translations, 2008 Cassandra’s fate is met with an accordingly visceral relish in Clytemnestra’s later reaction to her murderous spree, and Bernstein delivers her interchange with the Chorus with a sanguine swagger which is somehow neatly consonant with the blindness of Tragic necessity:

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The Oresteia ( Ancient Greek: Ὀρέστεια) is a trilogy of Greek tragedies written by Aeschylus in the 5th century BCE, concerning the murder of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra, the murder of Clytemnestra by Orestes, the trial of Orestes, the end of the curse on the House of Atreus and the pacification of the Furies (also called Erinyes or Eumenides). Interestingly, the gender conflict is finally resolved by a woman – the goddess Athene – but not in favor of women. On the contrary: the very fact that Athene doesn’t have a mother is used as an argument in support of Apollo’s and Orestes’ claim that a mother is less of a parent than a father, and, thus, punishing a matricide is beyond the moral realm of the Erinyes. Athena agrees with this assessment and votes for the acquittal of Orestes; her vote turns out to be the deciding one. Herbert Weir Smyth, Aeschylus, Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols. Greek text with facing translations, 1922 – prose Agamemnon Libation Bearers Eumenides The following year, in 2016, playwright Zinnie Harris premiered her adaptation, This Restless House, at the Citizen's Theatre to five-star critical acclaim. [31] Chronology of adaptations [ edit ]The Flies ( French: Les Mouches) is a play by Jean-Paul Sartre, produced in 1943. It is an adaptation of the Electra myth, previously used by the Greek playwrights Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides. MacLeod, C. W. (1982). "Politics and the Oresteia ". The Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 102. doi: 10.2307/631132. JSTOR 631132. pp.124–144. Widzisz, Marcel (2012). Chronos on the Threshold: Time, Ritual, and Agency in the Oresteia . Lexington Press. ISBN 978-0-7391-7045-8. GreekMythology.com editors write, review and revise subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge

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To the anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen ( Das Mutterrecht, 1861), the Oresteia shows Ancient Greece's transition from "hetaerism" ( polyamory) to monogamy; and from "mother-right" ( matriarchal lineage) to "father-right" ( patriarchal lineage). According to Bachofen, religious laws changed in this period: the Apollo and Athena of The Eumenides present the patriarchal view. The Furies contrast what they call "gods of new descent" with the view that matricide is more serious than the killing of men. With Athena acquitting Orestes, and the Furies working for the new gods, The Eumenides shows the newfound dominance of father-right over mother-right. [21] The only trilogy in Greek drama that survives from antiquity, Aeschylus' The Oresteiais translated by Robert Fagles with an introduction, notes and glossary written in collaboration with W.B. Stanford in Penguin Classics. But even if Taplin loses some of the original’s linguistic complexity, he has created an English version full of sonic and metaphorical wealth, as when the Chorus sings of an obscure fate that should be spoken, but is not: Orestes and Pylades kill Clytemnestra and Aegisthus on a cinerary (funerary) urn in the Museo Archeologico Regionale Antonino Salinas in Palermo, Italy

American playwright Ellen McLaughlin and director Michael Khan's The Oresteia, premiered on April 30, 2019 at the Shakespeare Theatre Company, Washington, DC. The adaptation was shown as a digital production by Theatre for a New Audience in New York City during the COVID-19 Pandemic and was directed by Andrew Watkins. [43] [44] Choephori, or The Libation Bearers, has a very different tone and pace to Agamemnon. As Bernstein himself comments, it feels like the middle slow movement, the adagio, of a symphony, with the other two plays carrying the driving force of the narrative. In this play, which takes place some years after the action of the first, the siblings are reunited after Orestes’ exile, and the heart of the piece is a dirge, the mournful kommos, spoken by Orestes, Electra and a Chorus who are now very evidently sympathetic to Orestes and his plight. As the son of a murdered father, it falls to him to exact vengeance, and Choephori presents a slow reveal of what Orestes has been told by Apollo’s Oracle at Delphi: The tallies are indeed equal at the end, and Orestes is allowed to leave for Argos. The Erinnyes, unsurprisingly, are not happy with the decision and threaten to destroy Athens in Orestes’ stead. Fortunately, Athena mollifies them by offering them a new role – the one of the Eumenides, the kindly protectors of Athens’ prosperity. Proteus a b Hester, D. A. (1981). "The Casting Vote". The American Journal of Philology. The Johns Hopkins University Press. 102 (3): 265–274. doi: 10.2307/294130. JSTOR 294130. The rhyme and half-rhyme, here and elsewhere, create a sense of an ornately poetic and claustrophobic dramatic world.

Bernstein Oresteia of Aeschylus (Paperback) (US Jeffrey Scott Bernstein Oresteia of Aeschylus (Paperback) (US

a b O'Neill, K. (1998). "Aeschylus, Homer, and the Serpent at the Breast". Phoenix. Classical Association of Canada. 52 (3/4): 216–229. doi: 10.2307/1088668. JSTOR 1088668. The Spaghetti Western The Forgotten Pistolero, is based on the myth and set in Mexico following the Second Mexican Empire. Ferdinando Baldi, who directed the film, was also a professor of classical literature who specialized in Greek tragedy. [33] [34] [35] [36] The Oresteia - An Introduction is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts. Thyestes and Aerope, Atreus’ wife, were found out to be having an affair, and in an act of vengeance, Atreus murdered his brother's sons, cooked them, and then fed them to Thyestes. Thyestes had a son with his daughter and named him Aegisthus, who went on to kill Atreus. [ citation needed] Mulroy and Taplin, meanwhile, adopt, at first glance, fairly similar approaches to each other: both use not only metre but also, for the lyrical choral passages, rhyme, to re-create something like the formal poetic effects of Aeschylus’ elaborate verse style. I hope these translations are symptomatic of a trend in classical verse translations towards using more of the rich resources of Anglophone poetics. Mulroy’s handling of metre and rhyme is technically proficient: his lines scan, his rhymes rhyme, and he manages to combine these accomplishments with a rendering of the Greek that is reasonably accurate and fairly easy to understand. But his English is fussy, archaising and stiff. Here, again, is the triumphant Clytemnestra:

Oresteia, trilogy of tragic dramas by the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus, first performed in 458 bce. It is his last work and the only complete trilogy of Greek dramas that has survived. La Tragedie d'Oreste et Electre: Album by British band Cranes which is a musical adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre's The Flies. An inexhaustible masterpiece is transformed into a glib anti-war morality play". Daily Telegraph. 1999-12-03. ISSN 0307-1235. Archived from the original on 2016-02-26 . Retrieved 2018-08-13. AeschylusA sense of anxiety is beautifully realised here. At the mercy of impulses both innate, and driven – by the god Apollo – Bernstein yields the fleeting suggestion of Hamlet, if only by definition of existential uncertainty. Apollo’s tribunal defence of Orestes against the Furies in the Areopagus is cravenly inconsistent but the judgement is never in doubt; Bernstein remains resolutely aware of the capriciousness of the entire pantheon of Greek gods, and of the subjection of the earthly players in a drama of bloody revenge.